The purpose of the Iowa Articulation Norms Project and its Nebraska replication was to provide normative information about speech sound acquisition in these two states. An assessment instrument consisting of photographs and a checklist form for narrow phonetic transcription was administered by school-based speech-language pathologists to stratified samples of children in the age range 3-9 years. The resulting data were not influenced by the demographic variables of population density (rural/urban), SES (based on parental education), or state of residence (Iowa/Nebraska); however, sex of the child exerted a significant influence in some of the preschool age groups. The criteria used to determine acceptability of a production appeared to influence outcomes for some speech sounds. Acquisition curves were plotted for individual phoneme targets or groups of targets. These curves were used to develop recommended ages of acquisition for the tested speech sounds, with recommendations based generally on a 90% level of acquisition. Special considerations were required for the phonemes /ng s z/.

This study compared speech-sound productions of 18 children with articulation errors obtained with three different speech-sampling methods. The same 20 stimulus words were elicited by each of three sampling methods: (1) Continuous Speech Task, (2) Modeled Continuous Speech Task, and (3) Spontaneous Picture-Naming Task. Subjects performed differently on each of the speaking tasks. Statistical treatment of the mean score data revealed that significantly more errors were elicited with the Continuous Speech Task than with the Modeled Continuous Speech Task or the Spontaneous Picture-Naming Task. In addition, significantly more errors were elicited with the Modeled Continuous Speech Task than the Spontaneous Picture-Naming Task. The Continuous Speech Task required the greatest amount of time to administer, followed by the Modeled Continuous Speech Task, and finally the Spontaneous Picture-Naming Task.

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Intelligibility and speaker pitch appear to be speech variables that influence teachers' perceptions of children's school performance.

Speech sound disorders appear to be an overt manifestation of a complex interaction among variables influencing literacy skills, including nonlanguage cognition, vocabulary, letter knowledge, and phonological awareness. These interrelationships hold across the range of speech sound production skill, as children with superior speech sound production skill experience superior literacy outcomes.